Summer can be viewed in a positive light: full of vacations, sunshine and reliving some of your favorite hometown memories. However, after experiencing the freedom that college brings students, summer break can also feel like a jail cell.
College grants students the ability to do whatever they would like. Free will is almost like a drug for the youth, a freeing feeling knowing you can be authentically yourself without the chains of your parents’ opinions or standards. Any hour of the day, moments await to be filled with memories.
As a freshman in college, going into summer is like entering a limbo stage of life. A season where you catch up with hometown friends and start to realize that many of their journeys don’t align with your path anymore. The friends from the high school chapter of your life were only meant to fit into that chapter. While this doesn’t apply to all friends in your hometown, entering your hometown is an odd feeling when it doesn’t even feel like home anymore. At college, you’ve made so many memories with new friends, new places and new passions, that you’ve changed as a person.
Now imagine walking into your bedroom that is frozen in time from your senior year of high school, when 17-year-old you shivered with fear for the unknown, but also excitement to see where you would land. You greet every past version of yourself with each step into your home. The same dent in the wall you made from trying skateboarding for the first time, the same peeling posters of a band you don’t listen to anymore, pictures hanging on your walls filled with people you haven’t spoken to in years. Many things in life have an expiration date. People, places and inevitably your hometown.
Nostalgia hits like a wave when you see the familiar welcome sign. You lie in your childhood bed, you have lain in since middle school, when you were two feet shorter. You sit at the desk you stressed over AP tests in your junior year of high school. You remember driving with high school friends to the same song you loved when you knew everything about each other. So much of our lives remains in the four walls of the place we call home. These few months are filled with nostalgia, annoyance with your parents, awkwardness when seeing an ex in the grocery store or agony going back to your hometown job.
It is OK to feel like you don’t fit in certain rooms you used to, it’s actually a blessing. This shows that you’ve grown into the person you have always wanted to be and accomplished goals in the past few months that a younger you would have dreamed about.
Change is inevitable. At a certain point, you might miss your college life, but what a privilege it is to yearn for two sides of your life that are filled with memories that live on forever.
In conclusion, while summer can bring highs and lows, making you feel all the emotions your 16-year-old self felt, give yourself some grace. Coming home to a place where you know every bend and every turn of the roads is sometimes a blessing in disguise, possibly learning new lessons at every familiar stoplight or grocery store high school reunion.